Do I need a new running training routine? Probably not? I’ve had pretty good success with running for several years now—I’ve maintained my aerobic fitness, boosted the distance I can run, and suffered almost no injuries. But what if I could reduce not only my injuries, but also my risk of injuries? What if I could run much faster?
I’ve never been a fast runner, and I was okay with that. I never wanted to win races. I just wanted to be fit and healthy. And yet….
Over the past couple of weeks I read Christopher McDougall and Eric Orton’s new book Born to Run 2: The Ultimate Training Guide, which draws on the vast material that McDougall wrote about in the original Born to Run, and in Natural Born Heroes, but offers a detailed 90-day training program, rather than requiring that you read between the lines of the narratives in those books. It’s a regularized version of the training Eric Orton provided while McDougall was writing Born to Run—training that took him from a frequently injured recreational running to someone who routinely runs ultramarathons.
It sounded good enough to me that I was going to give it a try. In fact, I was going to start with day one this past Monday. Then I read the first day’s activities and observed that before day one (on day zero, I suppose), you’re supposed to time yourself running one mile as fast as you can. The book then goes on to use that time to give you target paces for all the upcoming runs.
There was too much ice and snow to get my one-mile time until yesterday, when I did go out and run one mile fast. I mean, not very fast, because, as I said at the start, I’m not a very fast runner. But I did run 1 mile in 10:04, which is very nearly as fast as I’ve ever measured myself running (click for a few measurements from 2003 and 2004).
New multi-use path from Curtis Road to Windsor Road, where I ran my timed mile
Not only does that mean that my running speed has scarcely declined in the past 20 years, it also challenges one of my fundamental beliefs. Back in the day I used to be able to average 12-minute miles, which meant that I’d have to run three times as fast to be competitive in a race. (And the past few years, as I was focusing on MAF training, I’ve done a lot of my runs even slower than that—averaging 14 or 15 minutes per mile.) But if I can run a 10-minute mile, then I’d only have to run twice as fast in order to be running with the non-elite front-of-the-pack runners.
Of course, McDougall makes no promises that his 90-day program will double my running speed, but even if I run only a little faster, with only a slightly lower chance of injury, it seems like it would be well worth giving it a try.
I’ve got my day-zero measurement, so maybe I could start in on day one of the program. Except, we’re still right at the start of winter, and I’m not at all sure that I’ll be able to follow the schedule, as far as the outdoor runs are concerned. But I don’t want to wait.
I think I’ll try to split the difference this way: I’ll start in on the various exercises in the program, many of which are indoor exercises anyway. They look like the sort of thing that need some practice anyway, so I’ll focus on learning them and on watching the weather. As soon as it looks like I’ll have a reasonable shot at getting the runs in, with only minor adjustments to the scheduled days, I’ll jump in.
For a couple of years now I’ve included in my warm-up mobilizing the joints in my foot by standing on and rolling this hard rubber ball. It’s really helped reduce running injuries.
But Ashley will use whatever means necessary to get the ball. So for two months I’ve scarcely done it.
I made two big ol’ mugs of hot cocoa. Delicious and warming! Now I’ve filled my empty mug with coffee, so that the cocoa dredges will make it ever-so-slightly mocha-y.
The pandemic is bad, but one bonus of avoiding public places is that I hear almost no Christmas music—which means that I’m not already tired of it before I’m ready to listen to some.
A couple of weeks ago, Jackie found this great duck-shaped dog tug-of-war toy. Made of ballistic nylon, it withstood Ashley ministrations for a full week before ending up eviscerated and decapitated:
So, we bought another one. Sadly, Ashley seems to have learned from experience, and she has already eviscerated this one in just two days:
One of the first things my Oura ring helped me figure out when I got it 4 years ago, was that if I eat a meal in the 4 hours before bedtime it interferes with my sleep. The effect was dramatic enough that Jackie and I switched to eating just two meals a day: breakfast an hour or two after we get up, and then our main meal of the day around 2:00 PM. Since that change, I’ve slept much better.
Sometimes though… life intervenes. Yesterday was one of those days. My local Esperanto group had its annual Zamenfest, and I brought pizza and cookies to the meeting, and ate a lot of both. (In fact, I not only ate several of the ginger sparkles I bought, I also ate some green star-shaped sugar cookies and some peanut butter cookies brought by other members of the group. It was a real cookie fest, as well as a Zamenfest.)
Unsurprisingly, I saw a repeat of the various issues that showed up 4 years ago, as can be seeing from looking at my Readiness metrics from my Oura ring:
The “Recovery index” basically means that my heart rate remained elevated until shortly before I woke up. That’s on top of the fact that it only got down to 53, which is rather high for me. My body temperature was 1.1℉ above baseline, which is probably just that my body was very active digesting food, rather than being a fever due to an infection or something.
A single day of this is no problem. Today I’ll eat on my usual schedule, and I expect I’ll sleep very well tonight. But I thought it was an interesting example of the sort of thing that the Oura ring is good at alerting the user to.
I didn’t get a picture of yesterday’s cookies, but here’s some from a prior year’s batch:
This morning Ashley was demonstrating good skills at hiding in the prairie grasses. Even though she’s black rather than brown, she was pretty well hidden when she crouched in the grass.
One metric that the Oura ring tracks is inactivity time: basically, the amount of time spent just sitting. It is here that I perhaps see the biggest dog-related change.
I have always spent a lot of time just sitting: I sit to work, I sit to read, I sit to watch TV, I sit to play a video game, I sit to write a blog post, I sit to eat. I sit in the morning while I drink my coffee, and I sit in the evening before getting ready for bed.
The Oura ring folks rather emphasize this particular metric, suggesting that “Keeping your daily inactive time below 8 hours works wonders for your body and mind.” I didn’t doubt this, but I did a pretty poor job of actually doing it. I had the occasional individual day when my inactivity was below 8 hours, but it was usually somewhat over. In fact, my average daily inactive time for the year before we got a dog was 9h 2min.
Since getting the dog, I’ve been way, way more active. I mentioned a few days ago that I was sleeping lot better, and listed a few metrics that had changed that seemed to be related—in particular, walking a lot more, but I hadn’t thought to check how my inactive time had changed, and the results are significant. My average daily inactive time over the 5 weeks since we got the dog has fallen to 6h 38min.
The shift is pretty obvious in a graph of my inactive time starting one year before I got the dog and continuing through yesterday:
Graph of my inactive time from November 2, 2021 through December 10, 2022
The change was dramatic enough that just 5 weeks of post-dog data pulled the overall average down by almost 15 minutes per day. (It’s actually kind of interesting how variable the individual data points are in the first year, and yet how absolutely flat the average is, until Dog Day.)
Well, I have been sitting for rather longer than I probably should to get this post written. I’ll go ahead and post it, and then carry on with the activities of the day.
A neighbor’s dog ran over to meet Ashley this morning. I’ve been a bit leery of that, because Ashley tends to growl and lunge when she meets other dogs. Today all went well, and I am much encouraged.
No photo of dog interaction, but here’s our little prairie
Ashley and I have been figuring out how the dog should be walked, in order to get her enough exercise that she isn’t a pest, and to make sure that she doesn’t have “accidents” in the house. Here’s how things seem to be shaping up:
First walk: As soon as we get up we go out for a peeing and pooping walk. This walk is usually very short, as the dog is happy to come right back in again when it’s cold and dark outside.
Second walk: After I’ve had a cup or two of coffee, Ashley is ready to go out again to Check All the Things. At first she just needed to check the patio. Then she needed to check the courtyard outside the patio. Now she wants to check the nearby courtyards and sidewalks as well.
Third walk: After breakfast (for her and us), and after it’s light outside, we go for our Long Walk of the Morning. This walk is often three miles or more, and often involves leaving Winfield Village and walking in nearby neighborhoods. Its goal is to give the dog enough exercise that she’s happy to doze for an hour or two after we get in.
Fourth walk: If our main meal of the day is late, I want to take the dog out for another short walk before we sit down to eat, so she can pee again.
Fifth walk: After our main meal of the day, we go out for another walk. Again, this walk is for peeing and pooping if necessary.
Sixth walk: Ashley’s main meal of the comes at 3:00 PM, so I can take her for another walk ahead of cocktail hour. The intention is for this to be her Long Walk of the Afternoon, although there’s not really enough time for as long a walk as would be necessary to get her to be calm during cocktail hour. So this is still a work in progress.
Seventh walk: Just before bedtime, I take Ashley out for another walk so she can pee, so she doesn’t need to pee during the night. This walk tends to be quite short, as Ashley is as ready to go to bed as we are.
The Fourth Walk doesn’t always happen, if she doesn’t seem to need to go out before our main meal of the day, so some days we’re already down to six walks per day. (We were doing about eight walks per day for the first several weeks, as anything less led to peeing or pooping in the house.)
Ashley during today’s Long Walk of the Afternoon
Longer term, I’m hoping to get down to about four walks: First walk, Long walk of the morning, Long walk of the afternoon, and Just before bedtime.
Wish me luck.
Although we’re doing slightly fewer walks, we’re probably walking longer distances—I’m averaging a full 8 miles per day last week and this week.
Walking the dog before sunrise and after sunset every day has gotten me more in touch with the phases of the moon (visible behind the branch above her) than I’ve been in years.
Since we got Ashley, I have been sleeping better. Remarkably better. It’s kind of amazing.
My Oura ring gives me some data to go on.
The place where it’s very obvious is in deep sleep time. In the month or so before I got the dog, I averaged 57 minutes of deep sleep per night. In the month or so since I got the dog, I’ve averaged 1 hour 23 minutes. Other improvements are significant, but not so impressive in terms of numbers. Total sleep has gone from 7 hours 34 minutes to 7 hours 41 minutes, which is enough to make a difference. Sleep efficiency (the percentage of the time in bed that I’m actually asleep) has gone from 87% to 89%, which doesn’t look so impressive, but also seems to make a difference. I’m also getting up much less often in the night.
Of course, this leaves me with the question of why.
I think partially, it’s just that she sets a great example: She comes to bed when we do, lies down between our feet, goes to sleep, and stays asleep—better than I do, anyway.
The other big change, of course, is that I’m walking way, way more than before.
Again the Oura ring provides some data, with “walking” that has gone from 7.3 miles to 11.2 miles per day. That’s misleading though, because the Oura ring reports a “walking equivalent” number. (Based on, I assume, my heart rate during other activity, such as weight lifting.) The FitBit software on my Pixel Watch gives me actual distance data, and the last half of October I was averaging 5 miles per day, while last week I averaged 7 miles.
Ashley sleeps just as well in the sun as she does in bed
After not making a big deal out of my having an Oura ring for 1, 2, or 3 years, Oura has presented me with a fancy graphic to celebrate my having tracked my sleep for 4 years.
As I’ve written before, I have very mixed feelings about the gamification of exercise. Still, the extremes that FitBit goes to are, well, extreme. Such as yesterday, when I took a couple of very long walks with the dog:
If you want to follow what I write here, but don’t want your own mastodon account, just point your RSS-feed reader at the mastodon-generated RSS feed that my mastodon instance provides.
Two of my favorite WebComics, False Knees and SORROWBACON are presenting broken RSS feeds from Tumblr. I don’t know what’s up. When I tried to look it said I needed to be logged in to Tumblr.
Our first look at the lease from new owner of Country Fair Apartments made it clear that they would ruin the place—a place we’d lived happily for 20 years—so we moved out. Even so, I’m a little surprised to see this just 8 years later:
Because the heat is not working, 9 out of 42 buildings are considered unlivable…. If the property owners don’t fix the issues in a timely manner, tearing down the buildings may be the next step.
Water Dragon Publishing has announced the upcoming publication of a new story by me!
We are excited to announce that we have signed an agreement with author Philip Brewer to publish his story, “A Classic Beginner’s Mistake”, as part of our Dragon Gems short fiction program.
As I did with Twitter when it was new, on Mastodon I’m pretty much following anyone who follows me, anyone who interacts with one of my posts, and anyone whose interesting post finds its way into my timeline. When that adds up to more posts than I can keep up with, I’ll curate much more strictly.
I have an orange fleece buff that I wear when it’s cold and windy. Ashley, still feisty after a walk, grabbed the back of it and started pulling tug-of-war fashion.
“Don’t do that Ashley! How would you like it if I started pulling something around your neck… Oh.”
It just occurred to me that I haven’t been tagging my dog 🐕 picture 📸 posts with the appropriate emojis, so here’s one to give people on micro.blog a heads-up that they may have missed some.
Gradually getting my follows arranged for Mastodon. I’m having less trouble than other people, because I had done my best to make Twitter act like Mastodon: I turned off anything that tried to “feature” posts, and just followed a list of people who tweeted interesting stuff.
I guess I don’t really expect that the demise of Twitter will lead to a grand resurgence in websites that offer RSS feeds as the way to follow your favorite writers.
As Twitter swirls around the plug hole, I thought I’d mention that I’m philipbrewer@micro.blog. I encourage you to follow me there.
I am also on Mastodon, but my first account there is for my Esperanto stuff, and is all in Esperanto. I’m looking to establish another Mastodon account specifically for my English-language writing-related stuff, but I need to pick a server first. Any suggestions?
I heard a tip some years back about how to handle dog barking. It made sense, and so I’d always planned to go with it if I got a dog. Trying it with just one pet isn’t much of an experiment, but it seems to be working, so I thought I’d describe it.
The basic thesis is this: You cannot teach your dog not to bark. Your dog has 10,000 years of evolution saying that an approaching stranger is a potential malefactor who must be barked at. You cannot train them out of this.
However, you can train them that they only need to bark until the pack leader has been made aware of the intruder, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do.
When Ashley spots someone who needs to be barked at, I hurry over to where she is and praise her profusely: “Good dog! You have alerted us as to the presence of a potential malefactor! That is exactly what you’re supposed to do! You’re the best! Have a treat!”
During the time that I’m praising her, Ashley will quit barking. She’ll also not bark while she’s eating her treat. Usually by the time the praise and treat are over the potential malefactor will have moved along, so there’s no need for more barking.
Occasionally (especially in these days of cell phones) the potential malefactor will still be in view outside the window, and Ashley will go on barking, but I try not to respond further. The essential lesson here is that she only needs to bark until I have been alerted, and that further barking is pointless.
Ashley has barked at any number of potential malefactors, but she has not barked so much as to be annoying to us or our neighbors. So, it’s looking like a win so far.
How it started: Ashley got up from the sofa and came over as if she wanted to sit in my lap in my chair. There really isn’t room though, so I thought I’d move over to the sofa, where we could more easily sit together.
Thought it might be getting a little late for third coffee, but looked at the clock and it was barely after 9:00 AM! Maybe we should go back to standard time every day!
I would prefer local solar time, and had thought next best would be permanent standard time, but maybe setting the clocks back an hour every day would be even better!
No doubt foolish of me, but when I adopted a puppy of a breed mix reported to be “high energy,” I expected more in the way of long brisk walks, and less in the way of having my hands and feet nibbled while I tried to do useful stuff.
The ancient Greeks were big on the idea that virtue lead to happiness and success, so this was kind of interesting:
I used to scoff at much of this, thoroughly convinced that institutions mattered more than virtue…. But the example of the past seven years… has pushed me in the opposite direction. Institutions matter, but so does virtue, especially among the nation’s leaders. —Attack on Paul Pelosi Has Unmasked the Republican Party
For years now, I’ve had a procedure that I go through just before going to bed, in which I check that both the front door and the sliding glass door are locked, that the toaster oven is unplugged (we had a near-catastrophe some years ago when the controls in the toaster oven got caught in a string bag that had been put on the counter), that the stove and oven are off, that the downstairs windows are closed and latched, and that the thermostat is adjusted to the proper nighttime temperature. I call it “Checking all the things.”
Last night, as I was getting ready to go to bed, Ashley (our new li’l pupper) wanted to go into the patio, so I opened the sliding glass door. She ran out, and then ran once around the perimeter fence, and then came right back in again. It didn’t take much more than 15 seconds.
My insight into dog brains is limited, but it sure looked to me like she was “checking all the things” out on the patio.
Walked with @jackieLbrewer to a nearby venue for early voting, and exercised the franchise. The walk was also a bit of exercise, although after I went for a run as well. 🏃
I’ve always been jealous of the sort of successful writer who can afford to design and build their optimal space for writing. But I’ve also read critiques of the idea: A real writer can write anywhere.
So I’m glad to see Cal Newport pointing out that “can write” might be true, and yet fall short:
“Putting professors into stark and spacious modern offices is functional. But is it as conducive to deep thought as the fire-warmed study of the Oxford Don?”
My brain wants me to get up when it starts getting light outside. Works great most of year—I wake up between 5:30 and 6:30. When sunrise doesn’t happen until after 7:00, my brain decides something has gone wrong, and wakes me up at 4:30. Not convenient.
I bought a Pixel watch. It came yesterday, and I had it on for today’s longish walk.
All through the 1990s I was waiting for the labor market to punish employers for their (then new) strategy of laying people off as soon as there was 15 minutes with no work to do, intending to hire them back (or hire somebody else) as soon as they had work again.
Capital markets forced employers to go that route. Any company that tried to resist—keeping on employees beyond the bare minimum—would see its stock price fall so much that it would be taken over in a leveraged buyout, and then the new owner would cut staff to the bone.
As I wrote for Wise Bread back in the day (in What’s an employee to do), it made me sad to watch. Surely, I thought, eventually the labor market would tighten up, and employers who had kept their employees on through a rough patch would have an advantage over employers who had to go out and recruit, hire, and train new employees.
Employers traumatized by not being able to hire enough people may not be quite so quick to lay them off:
“When the job market slows, employers will have recent, firsthand memories of how expensive it can be to recruit, and train, workers. Many employers may enter the slowdown still severely understaffed, particularly in industries like leisure and hospitality that have struggled to hire and retain workers since the start of the pandemic. Those factors may make them less likely to institute layoffs.”
Assets are called “safe” when they’re free of default risk. But that doesn’t mean their prices can’t drop, or that the financial system is safe if systemically important institutions buy them on margin.
What appears to be a liquidity issue will ultimately become a financial stability issue as investors discover their “safe assets” are not safe.
Yesterday at the Blind Pig I filled my growler with their India Brown Ale. Not exactly the hoppy porter I have yearned for, but as close as I’ve found. @jackieLbrewer is drinking the same.
I’m considering registering for the Rattlesnake Master Run for the Prairie 10k coming up in just over a month. Ahead of any race it makes sense to do a bit of speedwork. And I wanted to do a little test, to make sure I’m up for running hard for (close to) that long. So I did.
I always hesitate before I call a workout “speedwork,” simply because I run so slowly, but really, anytime you run faster than usual, it counts as speedwork.
I do two sorts of speedwork. Sometimes I do sprints (either on the flat or uphill). Other times I do what I did today, which is perhaps a tempo run or perhaps a lactate threshold run—I’m not sure which is a better description.
What I actually did was set out to run at the fastest pace I could maintain for an hour. The whole run came in at 5.19 mi in 01:08:43, so an average pace of 13:13 min/mi. That included some easy minutes to warmup at the beginning, and then some cooldown at the end. The core part of the workout (which was intended to be 1 hour) came in at 4.58mi in 00:58:50, so an average pace of 12:50 min/mi.
I’m actually pretty pleased with that. For around six years now I’ve been trying (for almost all my runs) to keep my heart rate low enough that the exercise is almost entirely aerobic. The target HR for that is given by what’s called the MAF 180 formula. (The formula is 180 minus your age, and then with a few modifiers, which for me would include another minus 5 because I’ve gone back on blood pressure meds.) So I should probably be trying to keep it under 112 bpm. Boy would that be slow.
Years ago I came up with 130 bpm, and had never updated it. I usually keep my HR down around 130 for the first two-thirds of a run, after which it tends to start creeping up.
To hit those low heart rates I had to run pretty darned slowly: I averaged maybe 16 min/mi, which put my running speed down into the range of a fast walk. (Actually, very slightly faster than that. When Jackie and I were training for our day-hike of the Kal-Haven Trail we worked on upping our walking pace, to be sure we’d be able to walk 34 miles during daylight, and we got up to where we could do a mile in less than 18 minutes, but I’m not sure we ever walked a mile in less than 17 minutes.)
Back in March I realized that I’d probably been pushing on that one lever (workouts at a low heart rate) for longer than made sense, and I started easing back into running faster for at least some of my workouts, and this is one where I tried to go a bit faster.
For this run my HR (excluding a few glitchy readings before I got sweaty enough for my HR monitor to work well) averaged 141 and maxed out at 151.
I looked back at this blog for reports of my running pace at various times, and found that I used to routinely break 12 min/mi, but all the specific reports I found were for runs under 3 miles. I did find that the previous time I ran Rattlesnake Master Run for the Prairie I ran it with an official time of 1:17:13.4 meaning a 12:26/mile pace.
At any rate, I’m pretty pleased with this run, both as a test, and as a bit of speedwork ahead of next month’s Rattlesnake Master Run for the Prairie, which I’m now considering a little more seriously.
Me and Jackie after the 2019 Rattlesnake Master Run for the Prairie.
Every time I go to read an article at @TheNewEuropean, instead of showing me the article, they accuse me of running an ad blocker. This is false, and a little insulting. And it’s a bit annoying that I can’t read their articles. But, oh well. I’ll make do as best I can without reading the latest from @paulmasonnews.
After a frustrating experience a couple of months ago, when Houlihan’s wasn’t serving outdoors, I decided to risk it again. Round trip walk from home will be well over 4 miles.
When I attended Clarion in 2001, Steven Barnes was my week-one instructor. Of course the class was about writing, but Steve talked quite a bit about martial arts in general and Tai Chi in particular—things that were important in his own life and in his own writing.
Although I had been interested in Tai Chi even before that, I didn’t get it together to find a class until 2009. But I managed to find a great class; one that made room for my idiosyncratic movement issues. It quickly became a daily practice that continues to this day. For several years I taught Tai Chi. I’ve retired from teaching it, but I still attend a group practice session in a nearby park several times a week in nice weather. (It’s free. Anyone is welcome. Send me email if you’re local or visiting and are interested in attending.)
All of which is to say that I was very pleased to find that Steven Barnes was teaching three Tai Chi classes at this year’s WorldCon.
Teaching individual Tai Chi classes is a fundamentally peculiar thing. I mean, if you’re trying to learn a Tai Chi form, you can expect to spend a year at it, if you take two or three classes a week. In that context, it’s kind of hard to know what to do with a single class, and the issue actually gets even more fraught if you’re teaching three classes, rather than just one.
Steve threaded the needle by focusing a large part of each class on talking about living well.
I started this post wanting to talk about all the great stuff that Steve covered—about movement and about life. But I hadn’t taken notes, and became somewhat daunted knowing that I’d skip all sorts of important bits. But, given the choice between documenting a few of the bits that stuck with me and documenting nothing, I’ve decided to go with the former.
I would like to emphasize that all these things are colored by my own thinking, so it is virtually certain that Steven Barnes would look at several of these things and go, “Wait a minute! That’s not what I said!” Don’t blame Steve for anything I get wrong. But this is how I remember it:
Purpose of life
On the first day, Steve mentioned that the Dali Lama said the purpose of life was to seek joy and to be of service. Steve used that statement to go on a short rant about being of service—how it’s the real motivation that gets most people out of bed in the morning. “Even if it’s just to feed the cat.” But on the third day he told a story that added some context.
Originally, he said, the Dali Lama said that the purpose of life was to seek joy. But people criticized him, saying that it sounded selfish to say that was the purpose of life. And the Dali Lama pushed back saying, “But as soon as you find joy, you’ll want to share it, and immediately find yourself drawn to be of service.” But people continued to complain, and eventually the Dali Lama conceded to the complaints and added the “and be of service” part.
And I think it’s good to tell the story this way, so that you get the context that “being of service” is an automatic urge, as soon as you find joy. It has certainly been my own experience.
Expertise
People almost always reach a point while learning something, where they perceive themselves as no longer getting better at that thing, even as they continue to train. Different people will keep training for different amounts of time before giving up, but most people eventually give up, before becoming an expert.
That has certainly been my own experience. There must be a hundred things—playing chess, identifying birds, gardening, StarCraft—where I did it enough to get pretty good at it, then found that getting significantly better would be hard work, and didn’t make the effort.
Steve suggested that 100 hours of study or training will give you a passing familiarity with some topic or activity, and 1000 hours gets you good enough to participate in a conversation about some topic with an expert. He also made a passing reference to the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice that it takes to develop actual expertise in something, but mentioned in an almost off-hand way the same issues with that idea that I talk about in my post on practice.
Three areas of life
One thing that I remember Steve talking about at Clarion was that he evaluated people as possible models for himself based on whether or not they were succeeding in each of three specific areas:
Financial success: Does the person have some sort of career or business that supports them and could support a family at whatever standard of living that person aspires to?
Family success: Has the person put together and maintained the sort of family they desire?
Physical success: Is the person fit enough and skilled enough to be able to do the things they want to do?
Steve specifically evaluates people on these standards when they offer unsolicited advice. If the person trying to tell him what or how to do or be has all three of these areas under control, then maybe their advice is worth listening to. Otherwise, probably not. (I gather he has a different standard for when he’s the one seeking advice or a service. He probably wouldn’t refuse dental care from a twice-divorced dentist or to fly on a plane just because the pilot was out of shape.)
Pain
When I taught Tai Chi I would begin the first class of each session by telling students that nothing we did in class should hurt. If anything hurt, they should make the move smaller, do a different move, and just wait until we went on to the next move.
Steve had a different perspective. He told students that any pain they felt while training should never go above a level of 3 (on a scale to 10).
I pondered that quite a bit since then, and I think Steve’s perspective makes sense in a way, especially for students who have chronic pain. I never meant to tell my students that they couldn’t take my class if they had pain; just that they shouldn’t do any move that made their pain worse. Another population for whom Steve’s standard probably makes sense is serious athletes or serious martial artists.
Movement
We probably spent half of each class moving, starting with a very nice mobility warm-up. It’s rather a lot like what I’ve taken to calling my morning exercises, but focused on working all your joints through their full range of motion, leaving out the muscle-activation stuff that I’ve added for my own purposes.
The form
Steven taught us the first three moves of his Tai Chi form. The first move was roughly the same as the move called Preparation in the form I do, but Steve emphasized the breathing as the entry point into the move: You inhale, and the movement raises your arms (leading from the tops of the wrists), and then you exhale and your arms fall (leading from the bottoms of the wrists). The second move involved stepping forward, turning your foot, and then pressing forward with your hands facing one another (a move we call “ji” in our style). I’ve already forgotten the third move.
Martial art versus martial science
Steve made a distinction between martial art and martial science. Martial science is figuring out the best way to win a fight or battle. Martial art, like any art, is about expressing yourself, in this case through fighting or battle.
This is something I’ve just come to understand very recently—that the “best” or “most effective” martial art is very context dependent. If you’re going to be fighting a duel—hand-to-hand, with swords, with pistols, whatever—that’s very different from battlefield fighting, where you would find yourself with potentially any number of opponents, along with some number of compatriots.
As an aside, my own observation: Krav maga is an excellent choice of martial art, especially if you have a handful of opponents. It has downsides, especially if you have “opponents” who are not enemies. If your opponents are people that you wouldn’t be comfortable maiming or killing, Brazilian jiu jitsu would be a better choice, but perhaps not if you find yourself surrounded by four or five gang members on the street after dark.
The point Steve was making is that martial arts are only appropriate in the appropriate context. There are many circumstances where “fighting,” and “winning a fight” yields significant benefits, but they’re context dependent. He mentioned an important teacher he had who, upon being asked for instruction regarding the best move for some circumstance, said “You’re a primate. Use a tool.”
Being willing to die
Steve told a story about being bullied in school, about how when he was bullied to the point where he couldn’t take it any more, he crossed to the middle of the nearby busy street. Standing on the yellow line, with traffic zipping past in both directions, he dared the bully to come out there and fight him.
The bully realized that he’d made a mistake.
The line, as I recall it was, “You have to be ready to die, and ready to take him with you.” I think a whole lot of martial culture involves people who have reached that point.
Fighting to stay alive
One thing that got some pushback from one member of the class was the idea that anybody would fight to live: Even someone so depressed as to be suicidal, if you put their head in a bucket of water, would fight to survive. One member of the audience suggested that clinical depression was a matter of brain chemistry, which Steve did not dispute. But the student talking about it said that, when she was at her lowest, if you’d killed her she’d have thought you were doing her a favor. Steve suggested that, even if you’d think that way in the abstract, if you find your head thrust into a bucket of water, you’d do everything you could to to breath.
I have no doubt that Steve was right here. A person suffering from clinical depression might well wonder why they’d fought to hard to survive, but I very much doubt that they’d just breath in water and be glad to pass on, even if they were at the point where they might later that day have chosen to swim into the sea too far to be able to swim back.
Okay.
Those are the bits I remember from Steve’s three Tai Chi classes. There was a lot more—probably other things that were more important than these.
I find myself a little surprised that the “three areas of life” stuff stuck with me the way they did. At Clarion I was doing pretty well in two of them—I had a career in software engineering that provided for my family, and I was in a successful long-term relationship with my wife. But my physicality wasn’t yet on point: I was somewhat fit; I could walk a long ways, I could even run a couple of miles, but I was overweight and unhappy about it.
I’m surprisingly pleased that I’ve managed to get all three under control. That same career lasted long enough (and I boosted my income enough with writing and teaching Tai Chi), that I’m able to support myself on my pension and my investments. I’m still married to the same woman I was married to when I went to Clarion. And since I was in Clarion I lost around fifty pounds while at the same time developing the ability to move in ways that would have been impossible when I was younger.
My Tai Chi practice was important to all those things. Perhaps it seems even more important than it was, because it was my entryway into moving better. Since stepping through that door I’ve explored a wide range of natural-movement practices. During the pandemic I (to an extent) switched back to an exercise- (versus movement-) based paradigm, but really just because exercise suited the circumstances. As the pandemic winds down, I expect I’ll switch back to movement rather than exercise as the focus of what I do.
Looking for a Steven Barnes link to use here I found this post in which he talks about the very classes I was in:
I was very pleased to be able to take another class—three classes!—from Steven Barnes. I enjoyed them, and I learned a lot.
I’m sure it indicates a character flaw, but I find this snowy owl’s attitude extremely relatable. (Of course, this same character flaw is probably how I made it this far through the pandemic without getting sick.)
Drinking Half Acre Bodem with @jackieLbrewer while we wait for lunch after a nice little hike at Allerton Park. (Google keyboard wanted to turn Bodem to Biden.)
Had a great time at WorldCon, but it’s good to be home.
Are you a member of a non-profit interested in “educating and informing the general public and supporting and empowering science fiction and fantasy writers?” Especially a group that might do a bit more with a bit of funding? Consider having them apply for a SFWA Givers Fund Grant.
At loose ends for an hour, so hit the fitness center. Kettlebell swings 30 lbs 5×25, hand-to-hand swings 25 lbs 7x13L/13R, rounded out with some clean and press.
Simulating a free college education by lending students money to pay to institutions, and then forgiving (part of) that debt is second-best compared to just providing a free college education. But it is much better than trapping another generation in debt peonage.
